Sunday, December 23, 2012

last minute gift that kids can make quick

Naiya got it in her head today (two days before Christmas ?!!) that she wanted to have a little gift for everyone we'd be seeing on Christmas day. Never fear, mama crafty is here...

In about an hour we made 15 of these pretty little "stained glass" window thingys. Originally we had talked about giving them to people as bookmarks but seeing them all lined up together in front of the window, we started to think they could just be lovely bits of art. Maybe even hang a few together as some kind of mobile? Whatever they end up being used for, I thought they were beautiful last minute creations that kids could put together for any occasion. They're basically the same as the "stained glass" hearts we made for Valentine's Day a few years ago with a variation in the shape.

We started by shaving some scrappy broken crayons with a cheese grater.

We sprinkled the shavings onto a sheet of wax paper that was sitting atop a towel.

(A few shavings go a long way. If the distribution is too dense, all the colors just melt together and make a dark glob.)

On top of this we laid another sheet of wax paper and another thin towel.

(From past experience we know it's possible that some of the colored wax will weep through the wax paper onto the towels so we chose towels with this in mind.)

We then melted the crayon bits by pressing a fairly hot iron on top of the top towel (pressing the iron, lifting and pressing
again) until the shavings had melted and the wax paper sheets had stuck together.

Using our handy roller paper cutter, we cut some card stock down to about 2 1/4" x 6".

Leaving about 1/2" frame around the edge, we cut out the center.

We used two of these frames for each book mark, one on either side of the wax piece.

We cut our wax stained glass slightly smaller than the frames and then assembled them using glue sticks.

Naiya helped with every step and only needed some guidance with the paper cutter and, of course, the iron.

Hi Lillian. One can get wax paper at most grocery stores in the aisle with aluminum foil and plastic wrap. I don't know about the laminating paper. Seems like it would work fine being that an iron is about as hot as a laminator. I wouldn't suggest running it through the actual laminator though.. you know, melting crayon and all. Good luck!

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